Quote Originally Posted by rebeccas-sewing View Post
Sounds like the pain meds kept him soundly asleep. I guess he was too down deep to hear the whizzing of your machine. Poor dear. I'm told those back problems are very painful. Is there anything the doctors can do to correct the problem? Or is pain medicine his only option.
DH was in the Army for 20+ years. About 12 years ago (2 years before I met him) he was driving to work, coughed, and felt his left leg go numb. His commander sent him to Hill AFB (about 90 minutes away) to meet with the base doctor, who specialized in back injuries and surgery. He insisted DH had a herniated disk. DH insisted it was his leg. The surgeon spent 3 years treating him for the herniation before doing an MRI, which showed (1) that the back was fine and (2) that he had a rotated ilium, which pinches the periformis muscle and the sciatic nerve. By that point, there was no way to fix it, just deal with the aftermath.

Because it's rotated, his hips are uneven, causing his spine to be out of alignment, and all the muscles from his hips to his shoulders to be in spasm. When I met him, his pain levels were around a 3 - 5 at any given time. Now he tells me they're between a 7 - 8 on a daily basis. He's tried accupuncture, chiropractic, massage therapy, exercise, sedentary, physical therapy, Chinese medicine, meditation, and trigger point injections, all with varying degrees of sucess. The next step, I'm told, is to implant electrical leads deep into the muscles that are causing the most problems (between his shoulder blades) which will send electrical impulses, confusing the nerve endings, and making them think there's no pain. If that doesn't work, there's nothing else to try.